Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) is an online effort for discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records.[1] It was started by a collaboration of United States–based organizations. SNAC undertakes research and development for, as it describes, "separating the description of people from the description of the historical records that were created by them and that document their lives and work".[2]

1.
Recorded history
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Recorded history or written history is a historical narrative based on a written record or other documented communication. Recorded history can be contrasted with other narratives of the past, for broader world history, recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BC, and coincides with the invention of writing. Examples of written texts, however, can be found dating as far back as 1750 BCE in Ancient Mesopotamia, for some geographic regions or cultures, written history is limited to a relatively recent period in human history because of the limited use of written records. Because of these limits, recorded history in different contexts may refer to different periods of time depending on the historical topic. The question of the nature, and even the possibility, of a method for interpreting recorded history is raised in the philosophy of history as a question of epistemology. Prehistory traditionally refers to the span of time before recorded history, prehistory refers to the past in an area where no written records exist, or where the writing of a culture is not understood. Protohistory refers to the period between prehistory and history, after the advent of literacy in a society but before the writings of the first historians. Protohistory may also refer to the period during which a culture or civilization has not yet developed writing, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing. Early examples are the Jiahu symbols, Vinča signs, early Indus script, earliest recorded history, which varies greatly in quality and reliability, deals with Pharaohs and their reigns, made by ancient Egyptians. Much of the earliest recorded history was re-discovered relatively recently due to archaeological dig sites findings, since these initial accounts, a number of different traditions have developed in different parts of the world in how to handle the writing and production of historical accounts. In China, the earliest history was recorded in oracle bone script which was deciphered, the Zuo Zhuan, attributed to Zuo Qiuming in the 5th century BCE, is the earliest written of narrative history in the world and covers the period from 722 to 468 BCE. The Classic of History is one of the Five Classics of Chinese classic texts and it is traditionally attributed to Confucius. Zhan Guo Ce was a renowned ancient Chinese historical compilation of materials on the Warring States period compiled between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. Sima Qian was the first in China to lay the groundwork for professional historical writing and his written work was the Shiji, a monumental lifelong achievement in literature. His work influenced every subsequent author of history in China, including the prestigious Ban family of the Eastern Han Dynasty era, Herodotus of Halicarnassus has generally been acclaimed as the father of history composing his The Histories written from 450s to the 420s BCE. However, his contemporary Thucydides is credited with having first approached history with a historical method in his work the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, regarded history as being the product of the choices and actions of human beings, saint Augustine was influential in Christian and Western thought at the beginning of the medieval period. Through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, history was studied through a sacred or religious perspective

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Information science
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Information science should not be confused with information theory or library science. Information theory is the study of the types of communications we use, such as verbal, signal transmission, encoding, Information science as an academic discipline is often taught in combination with Library science as Library and Information Science. Library science as such is a related to the dissemination of information through libraries making use of the principles of information science. Information science focuses on understanding problems from the perspective of the involved and then applying information. In other words, it tackles systemic problems first rather than individual pieces of technology within that system and it must therefore be regarded as an autonomous system controlling and ultimately permeating all other subsystems of society. Several institutions have formed an I-School Caucus, but numerous others besides these also have comprehensive information foci and it is concerned with that body of knowledge relating to the origination, collection, organization, storage, retrieval, interpretation, transmission, transformation, and utilization of information. It has both a pure science component, which inquires into the subject without regard to its application, and an applied science component, some authors use informatics as a synonym for information science. This is especially true when related to the concept developed by A. I, Mikhailov and other Soviet authors in the mid-1960s. The Mikhailov school saw informatics as a related to the study of scientific information. Informatics is difficult to define because of the rapidly evolving. Definitions reliant on the nature of the used for deriving meaningful information from data are emerging in Informatics academic programs. Regional differences and international terminology complicate the problem, some people note that much of what is called Informatics today was once called Information Science – at least in fields such as Medical Informatics. Brian Campbell Vickerys Information Systems places information systems within IS, ellis, Allen, & Wilson, on the other hand, provide a bibliometric investigation describing the relation between two different fields, information science and information systems. Philosophy of information studies conceptual issues arising at the intersection of science, information technology. In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and it can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain. More specifically, an ontology is a model for describing the world consists of a set of types, properties. Exactly what is provided around these varies, but they are the essentials of an ontology, there is also generally an expectation that there be a close resemblance between the real world and the features of the model in an ontology. In theory, an ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation, an ontology renders shared vocabulary and taxonomy which models a domain with the definition of objects and/or concepts and their properties and relations

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National Archives and Records Administration
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The NARA also transmits votes of the Electoral College to Congress. The chief administrator of NARA is the Archivist of the United States, the Archivist of the United States is the chief official overseeing the operation of the National Archives and Records Administration. The Archivist not only maintains the official documentation of the passage of amendments to the U. S, Constitution by state legislatures, but has the authority to declare when the constitutional threshold for passage has been reached, and therefore when an act has become an amendment. The Office of the Federal Register publishes the Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations and it also administers the Electoral College. Since 1964, the NHPRC has awarded some 4,500 grants, the Office of Government Information Services is a Freedom of Information Act resource for the public and the government. Congress has charged NARA with reviewing FOIA policies, procedures and compliance of Federal agencies, NARAs mission also includes resolving FOIA disputes between Federal agencies and requesters. Originally, each branch and agency of the U. S. government was responsible for maintaining its own documents, Congress established the National Archives Establishment in 1934 to centralize federal record keeping, with the Archivist of the United States as chief administrator. The National Archives was incorporated with GSA in 1949, in 1985 it became an independent agency as NARA, connor, began serving in 1934, when the National Archives was established by Congress. As a result of a first Hoover Commission recommendation, in 1949 the National Archives was placed within the newly formed General Services Administration. The Archivist served as an official to the GSA Administrator until the National Archives. An audit indicated that more than one third withdrawn since 1999 did not contain sensitive information, the program was originally scheduled to end in 2007. In 2011, a retired employee pleaded guilty to stealing original sound recordings from the archives, Archival Recovery Teams investigate the theft of records. NARAs holdings are classed into record groups reflecting the governmental department or agency from which they originated, Records include paper documents, microfilm, still pictures, motion pictures, and electronic media. Archival descriptions of the permanent holdings of the government in the custody of NARA are stored in the National Archives Catalog. The archival descriptions include information on traditional paper holdings, electronic records, as of December 2012, the catalog consisted of about 10 billion logical data records describing 527,000 artifacts and encompassing 81% of NARAs records. There are also 922,000 digital copies of already digitized materials, most records at NARA are in the public domain, as works of the federal government are excluded from copyright protection. However, records from other sources may still be protected by copyright or donor agreements and its Information Security Oversight Office monitors and sets policy for the U. S. governments security classification system. Many of NARAs most requested records are used for genealogy research

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Library science
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Rather than classifying information based on nature-oriented elements, as was previously done in his Bavarian library, Schrettinger organized books in alphabetical order. The first American school for science was founded by Melvil Dewey at Columbia University in 1887. It is an aspect of the field of librarianship. Historically, library science has also included archival science, LIS should not be confused with information theory, the mathematical study of the concept of information. Library and information science can also be seen as an integration of the two fields of science and information science, which were separate at one point. Library philosophy has been contrasted with science as the study of the aims. The earliest text on library operations, Advice on Establishing a Library was published in 1627 by French librarian, Naudé wrote prolifically, producing works on many subjects including politics, religion, history, and the supernatural. He put into all the ideas put forth in Advice when given the opportunity to build. Martin Schrettinger wrote the textbook on the subject from 1808 to 1829. The Jefferson collection provided the start of what became the Library of Congress, the term library economy was common in the U. S. until 1942, with the library science predominant through much of the 20th century. Later, the term was used in the title of S. R. Ranganathans The Five Laws of Library Science, published in 1931, and in the title of Lee Pierce Butlers 1933 book, An introduction to library science. S. R. Ranganathan conceived the five laws of science and the development of the first major analytico-synthetic classification system. In India, he is considered to be the father of science, documentation. He was one of the first faculty at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School and this research agenda went against the more procedure-based approach of library economy, which was mostly confined to practical problems in the administration of libraries. While Ranganathans approach was philosophical it was tied more to the day-to-day business of running a library. A reworking of Ranganathans laws was published in 1995 which removes the constant references to books, in more recent years, with the growth of digital technology, the field has been greatly influenced by information science concepts. This university was the first in Asia to begin teaching library science, the Punjab Library Primer was the first textbook on library science published in English anywhere in the world. The first textbook in the United States was the Manual of Library Economy and this report had a significant impact on library science training and education

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Wikidata
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Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a source of data which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. This is similar to the way Wikimedia Commons provides storage for files and access to those files for all Wikimedia projects. Wikidata is powered by the software Wikibase, Wikidata is a document-oriented database, focused on items. Each item represents a topic and is identified by a number, prefixed with the letter Q—for example. This enables the basic information required to identify the topic the item covers to be translated without favouring any language, information is added to items by creating statements. Statements take the form of pairs, with each statement consisting of a property. The creation of the project was funded by donations from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, at this time, only the first phase was available. Historically, a Wikipedia article would include a list of links, being links to articles on the same topic in other editions of Wikipedia. Initially, Wikidata was a repository of interlanguage links. No Wikipedia language editions were able to access Wikidata, so they needed to continue to maintain their own lists of interlanguage links, on 14 January 2013, the Hungarian Wikipedia became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata. This functionality was extended to the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias on 30 January, to the English Wikipedia on 13 February, on 23 September 2013, phase 1 went live on Wikimedia Commons. The first aspects of the second phase were deployed on 4 February 2013, the values were initially limited to two data types, with more data types to follow later. The first new type, string, was deployed on 6 March, the ability of the various language editions of Wikipedia to access data added to Wikidata as part of phase two was rolled out progressively between 27 March and 25 April 2013. On 16 September 2015, Wikidata began allowing so-called arbitrary access, for example, in the past the article about Berlin you could not access data about Germany, but with arbitrary access it could. On 27 April 2016 arbitrary access was activated on Wikimedia Commons, phase 3 will involve database querying and the creation of lists based on data stored on Wikidata. As of October 2016 two tools for querying Wikidata were available, AutoList and PetScan, additionally to a public SPARQL endpoint, there is concern that the project is being influenced by lobbying companies, PR professionals and search engine optimizers. As of December 2015, according to Wikimedia statistics, half of the information in Wikidata is unsourced, another 30% is labeled as having come from Wikipedia, but with no indication as to which article

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National Endowment for the Humanities
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The NEH is housed at 400 7th St SW, Washington, D. C. From 1979 to 2014, NEH was located at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D. C. in the Nancy Hanks Center at the Old Post Office. NEH was based upon recommendation of the National Commission on the Humanities, the tenth Chair of the NEH is William Bro Adams, formerly president of Colby College in Maine. President Obama nominated Adams on April 4,2014, Adams was confirmed by the Senate in a vote on July 9,2014. Adams appointed Margaret Plympton as the Deputy NEH Chair in January 2015, prior to Adamss appointment, the NEH was headed by Acting Chair Carole M. Watson. The ninth NEH Chair was Jim Leach, President Obama nominated the former Iowa congressman, a Republican, to chair the NEH on June 3,2009, the Senate confirmed his appointment in August 2009. Leach began his term as the NEH Chair on August 12,2009, according to Leach, Little is more important. than establishing an ethos of thoughtfulness and decency of expression in the public square. Words reflect emotion as well as meaning and they clarify—or cloud—thought and energize action, sometimes bringing out the better angels in our nature, sometimes lesser instincts. The Endowment is directed by the NEH Chair, advising the Chair is the National Council on the Humanities, a board of 26 distinguished private citizens who are also appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The National Council members serve staggered six-year terms, the Endowment is directed by a presidentially appointed Chair, who approves all recommendations and awards grants. All of the Chairs recommendations are informed by the National Council on the Humanities, the Division of Public Programs supports projects that bring the humanities to large audiences through libraries and museums, television and radio, historic sites, and digital media. The Division of Research makes awards to support original scholarship in all areas of the humanities, funding individuals as well as teams of researchers, the Division of Education works to support and strengthen teaching of the humanities. The Office of Federal/State Partnership collaborates with 56 state and territory humanities councils to strengthen local programs, the Office of Challenge Grants administers grants intended to support centers and endowments through fundraising by humanities institutions to further long-term stability. The Office of Digital Humanities advises on use of technology in the humanities and coordinates and these are special priorities of the Endowment that indicate critical areas of the humanities as identified by the NEH Chair. They differ from the divisions of the Endowment in that they do not sponsor or coordinate specific grant programs, bridging Cultures is an NEH initiative that explores ways in which the humanities promote understanding and mutual respect for people with diverse histories, cultures, and perspectives. Projects supported through this initiative focus on cultures globally as well as within the United States, international projects might seek to enlarge Americans understanding of other places and times, as well as other perspectives and intellectual traditions. American projects might explore the variety of cultural influences on. These projects might also investigate how Americans have approached and attempted to surmount seemingly unbridgeable cultural divides, or examine the ideals of civility and civic discourse